BLACK UTOPIA AND BODY AGENCY IN RIVERS SOLOMON’S AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS
Keywords:
black utopia, Afrofuturism, critical posthumanism, black antihumanism, agency, queer kinship, autistext, biopoliticsAbstract
After situating Rivers Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017) as a black utopia following Zamalin’s definition of the genre, this essay will explore the text from the intra-acting lenses of black antihumanism, critical posthumanism, and queer kinship. I contend that Solomon’s novel surpasses the notions of Afrofuturism and (white) critical posthumanism alike through its portrayal of the main characters’ gender and sexual non-conformity and the radical kinship bonds they develop among themselves and with the nonhuman in the protagonist’s case. Furthermore, by the characters’ willful control and agency over their own bodies and the future possibilities envisioned in its open ending, Solomon’s ‘autistext’ subverts and explodes the Western, Enlightenment, colonial construction of white (civilized) subjecthood as opposed to the animalization of the black body and the universalist, exceptionalist logic of state-sanctioned brutality inflicted on African Americans since the Antebellum times.
Downloads
References
AGAMBEN, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford UP, 1998.
AOURAGH, Miriyam. “‘White Privilege’ and Shortcuts to Anti-Racism.” Race & Class, vol. 61, 2019, pp. 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396819874629.
BACCOLINI, Raffaella. “Dystopia Matters: On the Use of Dystopia and Utopia.” Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal, no. 3, 2006, pp. 1–4. https://ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/ficheiros/3056.pdf
BARNWELL, Andrea D. “Like the Gypsy’s Daughter or Beyond the Potency of Josephine Baker’s Eroticism.” Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey, U of California P, 1997, pp. 82–89.
BENNETT, Joshua. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2020.
BRAIDOTTI, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity, 2013.
BROWN, Jayna. Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. Duke UP, 2021.
BUTLER, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006.
CLEVELAND, Kimberly. Africanfuturism: African Imaginings of Other Times, Spaces, and Worlds. Cambridge UP, 2024. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.16275965.
DE BRUIN-MOLÉ, Megen. “Salvaging Utopia: Lessons for (and from) the Left in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), The Deep (2019), and Sorrowland (2021).” Humanities, Vol. 10, no. 4, 2021, pp. 109–19. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10040109.
FALCK, Alex. “An Interview with Author Rivers Solomon.” Intellectual Freedom Blog, 10 October 2018, https://www.oif.ala.org/oif/an-interview-with-author-rivers-solomon/. Accessed 10 May 2025.
FINCH, Megan. “Missing Mothers of the Afropocene: Parable of the Sower and Octavia Butler’s Legacy in An Unkindness of Ghosts.” The Black Scholar, vol. 54, no. 2, 2024, pp. 20–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2024.2318691.
GLISSANT, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing, U of Michigan P, 1997. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10257.
JACKSON, Zakiyyan Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York UP, 2020.
LORDE, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic in Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Audre Lorde, Crossing Press, Freedom, 1984, pp. 53–59.
MBEMBE, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.
OBOURN, Milo. “‘Are You Now So Deluded You Think You Exist Outside the Category of Everything?’: A Posthumanist Critical Disability Analysis of Black Motherhood Beyond Cisgenderism in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts.” Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women’s Writing: Race and Narrative Innovation, edited by Sheldon George and Jean Wyatt, Bloomsbury, 2024, pp. 197–210. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350383500.ch-008.
PELLEGRINI, Chiara. “Temporalities Beyond Transition: Form, Genre, and Contemporary Trans Novels.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 55, no. 4, 2023, pp. 492–508. https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2023.a913308.
PRIETO LÓPEZ, Paola. Black Women Centre Stage: Diasporic Solidarity in Contemporary Black British Theatre. Routledge, 2024. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003393627.
QUASHIE, Kevin. Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being. Duke UP, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021322.
SCHULTZ, Hannah. “Ecological Identity and Resistance in the Plantationocene: Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, vol. 41, no. 4, 2024, pp. 719–33. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isad034.
SOLOMON, Rivers. An Unkindness of Ghosts. Akashic Books, 2017.
SOLOMON, Rivers. Model Home. MCD, 2024.
SOLOMON, Rivers. Sorrowland. Merky Books, 2021.
SOLOMON, Rivers. The Deep. Hodeer and Stoughton, 2019.
WATKINS, Claire Vaye. “Magical Systems and Fusion Reactors: Rivers Solomon Discusses An Unkindness of Ghosts.” The Rumpus, 26 September 2017. https://therumpus.net/2017/09/26/the-rumpus-interview-with-rivers-solomon/. Accessed 3 June 2025.
WILLEY, Angela. “Rethinking Monogamy’s Nature: From the Truth of Non/Monogamy to a Dyke Ethics of ‘Antimonogamy.’” Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 2018, pp. 235–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2017.1340006.
YERGEAU, M. Remi. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Duke UP, 2018.
ZAMALIN, Alex. Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism. Columbia UP, 2019. https://doi.org/10.7312/zama18740
